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If you haven't seen it yet Dave from Dave's Geeky Hockey made a post about adding a Budweiser style goal light to an NHL'94 cartridge. You should go read that article now. Dave is the mastermind who is always coming up with amazing ideas and products. I'm a huge fan. Just now we had a little back and forth on twitter about actually MAKING THIS and he brings up a great question. Can the light be coded to physically come on when a goal is made in the game?

Are there other ways to do it?

-I suggested a button on the controller.

-An active listening device set to activate the light when it hears the goal horn.

I am not a coder or electronics guy, but I assume that if there is two-way communication between the cart and the system, that whatever code triggers the system to play the goal music should be able to trigger another event (like a flashing bar of red leds). You would have to have an internal power source to power the leds, but it would all be a pretty low power draw.

This has me thinking. I wonder if we could code a button on the 6-button controller to play the "crowd booing" sound on demand? Kind of like some of the old Superchexx games.

Make some kind of simple "AND" circuit that corresponds to an instruction offset/address in the ROM that is only executed when a goal is scored (such as the goal siren playing or the score incrementing, which could be discovered using the debugging emulator's trace feature).

When that circuit detects that the instruction has been accessed (which will only be for tiny fraction of a second, so I have no idea what kind of circuitry you're going to need to detect it), it outputs a signal in the ON state for a moment.

The light has a circuit that detects when that output signal switches ON, it activates the light for a set period of time, plays a sound, whatever.

There's probably some Arduino or Raspberry Pi hobbyist out there who thinks this is super easy, but I have no idea how to do it.

Make some kind of simple "AND" circuit that corresponds to an instruction offset/address in the ROM that is only executed when a goal is scored (such as the goal siren playing or the score incrementing, which could be discovered using the debugging emulator's trace feature).

When that circuit detects that the instruction has been accessed (which will only be for tiny fraction of a second, so I have no idea what kind of circuitry you're going to need to detect it), it outputs a signal in the ON state for a moment.

The light has a circuit that detects when that output signal switches ON, it activates the light for a set period of time, plays a sound, whatever.

There's probably some Arduino or Raspberry Pi hobbyist out there who thinks this is super easy, but I have no idea how to do it.

I'm no expert, but the code to run a small RaspPiZero with the light string would be the easy part (although you'd need a customized cart to fit it all in), it would definitely be mapping the cart to trigger the event that would be the tough part.